American Stage lines up next season

ST. PETERSBURG -- American Stage has been without a permanent artistic director for seven months, but the show must go on. This week, the theater announced its lineup for the 2002-03 season, put together by managing director Lee Manwaring Lowry and interim artistic director Neil DeGroot.

David Auburn's Proof, the Tony Award winner for best play last year, is tentatively scheduled to open the season Sept. 20, if performance rights are secured. The season also includes a premiere, Bob Devin Jones' stage adaptation of Parallel Lives, a collection of essays on growing up in racially divided Florida in the 1950s and '60s by St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell and novelist Beverly Coyle.

The largest production is the Oscar Wilde classic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. Also on the schedule are Over the River and Through the Woods by Joe DiPietro and Mere Mortals and Other Plays by David Ives.

"The five plays . . . examine a variety of ways to 'Become,' from major life decisions to the small choices that together add up to a lifetime, and from the external events that change us to the internal reflection that helps us change ourselves," Lowry said in a press release.

The theater also announced its fifth and final production of the current season, Claudia Shear's comic meditation on Mae West, Dirty Blonde, opening July 12. The cast and director were not announced.

American Stage has formed a search committee to find a replacement for artistic director Kenneth Mitchell, who was fired in October. (Mitchell appears in a Stageworks production of Waiting for Godot in Tampa in June.) The seven-member committee is co-chaired by trustee Mary Myers and Lowry, who said the theater hopes to have a new artistic director by November.

This year's Shakespeare in the Park show, The Bomb-itty of Errors, a hip-hop version of The Comedy of Errors, developed into quite a hit over its five-week run. It set a single-night attendance record when 1,700 were at Demens Landing in St. Petersburg for the May 11 performance. Total attendance was about 16,000. The production, with the same cast, will be seen this summer in Chicago and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

Can American Stage top Bomb-itty?

"I don't think you top it," Lowry said. "I think you top it by going in a totally different direction."

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright